Category: Communications Lab

    The fiction story “The Machine Stops” presents a future society where people live under the control of the machine and can only communicate through the machine. The machine almost become a religious leader in the virtual world that it creates and people lost themselves in the machine’s time. When the machine breaks down, human society collapses easily because every individual is isolated and alienated. Only at this time did people realize that the worship of the machine will finally destroy themselves.

    Although the story seems extreme and horrible, it has some realistic significance which shows the potential outcomes of the machine-oriented society. In modern society, we can hardly live without machines or electronic devices. Our computers that connected with the internet becomes our “eyes” to see the views, our “ears” to hear the sounds or even our “brain” to think and operate. All the electronic devices deprive human of our senses and autonomous thoughts. The communication and connection between people are so dependent on these devices that we become addicted to them and neglect the foundation as a human being, for example, the way we communicate face to face or the right to control our will and consciousness. Just like Vashti thought in the story “the Machine did not transmit nuances of expression. It only gave a general idea of people — an idea that was good enough for all practical purposes”. When people believe whatever the machine shows to them, they will lose the ability to feel the real and subtle emotion or experience the natural world. The inner spirit of an individual and people’s fundamental rights are eliminated. The internet and the big data in modern society try to isolate us from the natural world or our inner selves by presenting limited information and affecting our decision. If we are not alert to the disadvantages when using and developing the machine and technology, they may ultimately destroy us.

       The Machine Stops is a science fiction about the future world. It is an extreme industrialized world that people rely too much on the machine in their whole life. Vashti always stays at her home, and she is afraid of reaching the ground and communicate with other people face to face. In this world, there is a huge amount people like Vashti. Most people adore the machine and trust everything on the book of the machine. In other words, they are controlled by the machine. However, one day the machine suddenly stops. The countries collapse and people are going to die.

       Although the novel is written in 1909, it still have ironic meanings in nowadays society. I have to admit that the smartphone is an indispensable thing in my daily life. And social software is also very important for me to communicate with others. I can use them to communicate with my parents, friends and even strangers without going out of my room. The smartphone and the internet are like the machine in the novel.  We can talk to other on video like how Vashti talks to her son Kuno in the novel.

      In the novel, Vashti communicates with her son only by the machine. Only when Kuno says that he will not talk to Vashti unless Vashti comes does Vashti go out of her home. In our society, we also have a similar phenomenon that we may now rely too much on the internet and ignore the people around us. So that let me think about a lot of questions. What if one day the internet crashed such as the stopped machine? Do we have other methods to communicate with each other instead of the internet?

In “The Machine Stops” by E.M. Forster, it talks about how in the future, the surface of planet earth is no longer a sustainable environment for human life to survive. To solve the problem, people lived underground and created “the Machine”, a global and omnipotent device that controls all spiritual and bodily needs that are needed and desired from human. The short story is primarily focused on two main characters, Vashti and her son Kuno, who live on opposite sides of the world. As we learn more about their communications and Kuno’s “outrageous ideas” and how others react to it, the machine slowly deteriorates and breaks down, bringing “civilization” down with it. After the two characters realize that in reality, humanity and it’s connection with the natural world is what really matters and something that is unnatural and technological is bound to have flaws.

When I finished reading this, I realized that in many ways, the ending message was very true. With green energy, power is built from the natural environment such as wind power and solar energy. Although technology is used to the convert the power over, the root of it all is natural, as opposed to burning fossil fuels for energy. It’s also scary to think that as we continue to develop AI, many people speculate that it will get to a point where AI will destroy human civilization, which is a common theme in sci-fi novels and films. However, while reading the short story, it was interesting to me how although the machine was the main controller of the underground people, it had not developed the capability to self repair and required human activity to fix that. Perhaps that could be a tool that is used to enhance AI. That as great as it can be, as long as the AI does not have the ability to self repair, then ideas such as the “end of human civilization” would not be an issue.